Ex nihilo - Podcast English

Vielleicht ist das größte Rätsel der Gegenwart, dass die entscheidenden, lebensprägenden Dinge sich unbewusst einhausen – in einem solchen Maße, dass man nicht einmal mehr zur Kenntnis nimmt, dass die eigene Lebensführung nicht auf bewusste Entscheidungen zurückgeht, sondern den Gewohnheiten geschuldet ist. Das altgriechische díaita bezieht sich folglich nicht auf die Ernährungsweise, sondern ganz allgemein auf die Lebensführung – wovon die Diäten, die wir unseren Abgeordneten gönnen, einen Widerschein liefern. Umgekehrt läuft der Gedanke, dass man die Lebensführung von der Ernährung abkoppeln kann, ja, dass diese eine Art Sondersphäre darstellt, auf eine Form der Verdrängung hinaus. Dass die großen Lebensmittelkonzerne sich dies zunutze gemacht haben, indem sie die Konsumenten mit geschmacksverstärkten, überzuckerten, billig hergestellten und durchweg kommodifizierten Lebensmitteln beliefern, mag der Logik des Kapitalismus geschuldet sein, erstaunlicher ist, dass auch die Medizin, die mit den fatalen Auswirkungen des täglichen junk foods zu tun hat, die Lebensführung ihrer Patienten aus dem Blick verloren hat. Ein Grund dafür ist gewiss die Spezialisierung, die den Wissenschaftsphilosophen Nicholas Murray Butler zu der treffenden Beobachtung veranlasst hat:

Ein Experte ist jemand, der immer mehr über immer weniger weiß, bis er alles über nichts weiß. (Nicholas Murray Butler)

Weil auf diese Weise der Patient (als ganzheitliches Wesen) aus dem Blick gerät, sind die Mediziner rat- und hilflos, was die Ausbreitung der Zivilisationskrankheiten anbelangt, oder wie man vielleicht eher sagen müsste: der Konsumkrankheiten. Denn zunehmend betreffen diese nicht bloß die fortgeschrittenen Alterskohorten, sondern auch Jüngere, ist es nicht selten, dass bereits Kinder unter Rheuma, Diabetes und Bluthochdruck leiden. Um dem entgegenzuwirken, hat der Diabetologe Matthias Riedl in den 90er Jahren das medicum Hamburg gegründet und später eine Fernsehsendung ins Leben gerufen, die, in höchst populärer Form, versucht, die Konsumenten daran zu erinnern, was sie tagtäglich zu sich nehmen – und welch fatale Wirkungen dieser wohlige Konsumismus auf ihre Gesundheit hat. Hat man im Marketing die Heldenreise C.G. Jungs auf den Konsumenten übertragen, so besteht die „Küchenpsychologie“, die Matthias Riedl gemeinsam mit seinen Kollegen, den »Ernährungs-Docs« anwendet, darin, die betreffenden Personen zu ermutigen, ihr Leben wieder in die eigenen Hände zu nehmen, sich gesund und bewusst zu ernähren. Nun ist eine solche Lebensveränderung, die man neumodisch „Selbstwirksamkeit“ nennen mag und die ein Mediziner wie Matthias Riedl als „artgerechte Ernährung“ bezeichnet, schon seit Kant die Aufgabe aller Aufklärung gewesen: die Befreiung des Menschen aus seiner »selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit«. Und ist das wirklich so schwierig? Vielleicht, und hier mag das Missverständnis aller Volksbeglücker gewesen sein, beginnt diese Befreiung nicht damit, dass man sich in irgendwelche Ideologien versteigt, sondern dass der erste Schritt in die Mündigkeit den Betreffenden in die eigene Küche hineinführt. Also dann, guten Appetit!

Matthias Riedl fokussierte sich nach anfänglicher journalistischer Arbeit auf die Medizin und leistete hier, mit der Gründung des medicum Hamburg, Pionierarbeit. Einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit wurde er durch die TV-Serie “Die Ernährungs-Docs” bekannt, welche die in der praktischen Arbeit gewonnenen Einsichten in einem erfolgreichen Fernsehformat umsetzte.

Von Mattias Riedl sind erschienen:

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Es ist schon eine Weile her, dass die alte Punk-Parole (»legal, illegal, scheißegal!«) sich Laut machte, gleichwohl scheint sich auch unsere classe politique in einer großen Verwirrung zu befinden, was den Geist der Gesetze anbelangt. Anders jedenfalls ist nicht nicht zu erklären, dass man im Jahr 2021 ein Vergehen namens Verfassungsschutz-relevante Delegitimierung des Staates ersann - und zudem, anders als ehedem, da man sich auf staatsfeindliche Gruppierungen fokussiert hatte, nun auch noch Einzelpersonen zu Beobachtungsobjekten macht. Was aus derlei unscharfen Rechtbegriffen erwächst, die auch Vorfälle »unterhalb der Strafbarkeitsschwelle« erforschen, lässt dunkle Erinnerungen an Orwell’sche Gedankenverbrechen und ein obrigkeitsstaatliche Denken aufkommen. Dass nun ausgerechnet jene Institution, deren Aufgabe es doch wäre, das Vornehmste dieses Staatsgebildes, nämlich seine Verfassung zu schützen (und zwar auf die diskreteste Art und Weise), sich als Akteur ins Tagesgeschehen einmischt und munter ihre Weisheiten in die Welt hinaustweeted, ist einigermaßen irritierend – umsomehr als derlei auf den bürgerlichen Tod der Beobachtungsobjekte hinauslaufen kann. Und so zitiert Mathias Brodkorb Toqueville, der schon im 19. Jahrhundert die Logik des Cancelns als ›Vervollkommnung des Despotismus‹ begriffen hat:

Du wirst dein Bürgerrecht behalten, aber es wird dir nicht mehr nützen (…). Du wirst weiter bei den Menschen wohnen, aber deine Rechte auf menschlichen Umgang verlieren. (…) Gehe hin in Frieden, ich lasse dir das Leben, aber es ist schlimmer als der Tod.‹

Die Beobachtungen, die Mathias Brodkorb (seines Zeichens Sozialdemokrat und Ex-Finanzminister der Landesregierung Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) in seinem Buch Gesinnungspolizei im Rechtsstaat zusammengetragen hat, sind durchaus verstörend. Dabei ist eine der großen Stärken, dass Brodkorb sich nicht nur mit den Beobachtungsobjekten des Verfassungsschutzes, rechts wie links, ausgetauscht hat, sondern auch mit Mitarbeitern des Verfassungsschutzes selbst. War letzteres nur unter konspirativen Bedingungen möglich, so bezeugen diese Innenansichten, dass auch langjährige Mitarbeiter der Entwicklung ihrer eigene Behörde höchst kritisch gegenüberstehen können.

Mathias Brodkorb, studierter Philosoph und Gräzist, hat sich, bevor er im Kabinett Sellering in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern zunächst Kultur-, dann Finanzminister wurde, vor allem dem Kampf gegen Rechts verschrieben. Derzeit ist er als Kolumnist für das Magazin Cicero tätig.

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While the harbingers were already visible long before, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that the days of the comparatively peaceful post-war order are numbered. Nevertheless, the calculations leading to all of this remain largely mysterious. How could a society such as the Russian one embark on such an adventure in which it reveals itself to the world as a terrorist state? The historian Sergei Medvedev, who saw the approaching catastrophe coming with his The Return of the Russian Leviathan, goes back deep into Russia's history to explain Putin's motivation - to figures such as Ivan the Terrible, the Golden Horde and the Chekists, who personify the legal State of Emergency. Medvedev's diagnosis, which sees Russia as the unconscious of a spiritually eroding postmodern age, is extremely dark. According to him, the invasion of Ukraine marked the beginning of World War III, which began with the invasion of Ukraine. 

Sergei Medvedev is an Affiliate Professor at Charles University in Prague. Born in Moscow, he studied at Moscow University and Columbia University in New York City. He specializes in political history, international affairs, and Russian studies. After over 15 years as a Professor and Associate Dean at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, he left Russia in March 2022. For many years, Sergei Medvedev was a contributing columnist to Russian Forbes, Vedomosti, and The Republic and filmed programs on history and culture for the Russian Kultura TV and TV Rain. Since 2015, he has been working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he hosts the intellectual talk show Arkheologiya.

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There is no doubt that the margins of society can reveal something about what shifts within. And this is precisely what’s drawn our attention to a young anthropologist whose work with young, primarily indigenous drug addicts in Vancouver reveals a picture that’s as paradoxical as it is surprising: namely a driving force behind addiction is an irrepressible longing for normality, that suburban life with a wife, family and steady job that’s been vaulted by the media in such role models as the vanilla girl, the tradwife, and the family guy. This indicates that the ‘normalcy of the everyday’ which the boomer generation fled has become an unredeemable dream of life for even large sections of the working class, raising the question if this normalcy has become an unredeemable life dream even for large sections of the working class. If that’s the case, it indicates yet another major upheaval in our current Social Drive. In a way, this also mirrors Danya Fast’s anthropological career. After examining the life dreams of young men in Africa as part of her early collaborative work, her gaze shifted to her native Vancouver: to the living conditions of young people who, as the title of her book says, The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver. Indeed, the drug crisis, having been exacerbated by the advent of fentanyl, shapes the image of this highly affluent city. As in San Francisco, luxury and misery go hand in hand. In the tradition of participant observation, which has characterized anthropology since Malinowski, Danya Fast immersed herself in the underground life of this city - and that’s what our conversation is all about.

Danya Fast received her MA from the University of Amsterdam and her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of British Columbia, where she’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. Her research papers and interests can be found at Academia, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar.

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The rise and fall of the Dread Pirate Roberts is a complex story that delves into the creation and dismantling of the Silk Road, an online marketplace for drugs. The narrative explores the dual identities of Ross William Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the Dread Pirate Roberts persona, who presented a respectable outward appearance while running a criminal empire. The text discusses the technological advancements, such as encrypted communication and anonymous currencies like Bitcoin, that facilitated the operation of Silk Road. The story culminates in Ulbricht's arrest in a public library, revealing the intricate planning and execution by law enforcement agencies to capture him. Despite conflicting portrayals of Ulbricht as both a villain and a hero, the narrative refrains from taking sides and instead seeks to uncover the underlying logic that led to his descent into the criminal underworld. The case of Silk Road serves as a study of the intersection between technology, politics, and morality, prompting readers to ponder the broader implications of digital anonymity and online crime.

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When does it ever happen that an intelligent contemporary describes himself as a neo-Luddite with conviction and a certain sense of status? This alone would be reason enough to talk with Baron Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky, co-founder of the British Social Democratic Party and a man who can look back on a long career in the English House of Lords. Skidelsky came into the public’s consciousness primarily through his multi-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, a work that sharpened and changed the Baron’s perspective on the machine age. While Keynes was an optimist, in Skidelsky’s writings, a distinctive, dystopian view gained the upper hand, not the least through his experiences of the Great Financial Crisis. And there’s no doubt that the seismic shock of the Digital Revolution has pushed Capitalism into a deep crisis of legitimacy, which can be seen primarily as our diffuse unease with modernity. And because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, many of our contemporaries seek salvation in apocalyptic thinking. Skidelsky, on the other hand, in addition to his economic grammatology, views the broader historical context as he focuses on the Machine as the Social Engine influencing our living conditions far more than any political ideology. Consequently, our discussion explores precisely what the upheaval accompanying the digital revolution is and to what extent we are dealing with a controllable event.

Robert Skidelsky, who taught Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1970 and has been an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College in Oxford since 1997, can look back on a varied career in politics while, above all, publishing several books.

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That society loses its way in phantasmata and ideological labyrinths may be attributable to the human-all-too-human – but it’s strange in a culture that declares science and objectivity its highest values. In this context, Wilfred Reilly’s work is enlightening in an old-fashioned sense: a political scientist undertakes the task of comparing and contrasting morality trends with the data and finds the results deeply troubling. As in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, where the data found that incidents of brutal police violence were in the low double-digit range, while the general public was convinced it was an almost endemic behavior that’s been documented thousands of times. Doesn’t this raise several difficult-to-explain questions of cognitive dissonance? How are such contradictions even possible in a society that considers itself enlightened? What does this have to do with our present Attention Economy? How is it possible that a culture of victimization develops in the shadow of the moral economy? All of these questions are touched upon in conversation with Wilfred Reilly.

Wilfred Reilly teaches political science at Kentucky State University, and his books Hoax and Taboo are widely discussed in the American public.

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Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the country has been at war, with the rest of the world having registered this state of exception in horror, as one of the post-war foundations of order has started to slip. Wherever events come rushing in, it's not uncommon for the soberly detached, skeptical view of the social analyst to fall by the wayside. But this is precisely what drew our attention to Volodymyr Ishchenko, who, in his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, links the events in Ukraine with the post-Soviet phenomenon of disintegration and decomposition. A point of reference he makes is Antonio Gramsci's conception of an Interregnum as that never-ending in-between spatiality in which ‘the old will not die and the new will not be born’ - an interim period in which those in power lack legitimacy, representing precisely an ideal breeding ground for Authoritarianism, Caesarism and even acts of aggression and violence of all kinds. What's so striking about his interpretation is that, gifted with this perspective, events in Ukraine are no longer seen as a special case but as a magnifying glass through which the crisis of representation that also afflicts the West is given a surprisingly new interpretation.

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist and research associate at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He writes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Left Review, and Jacobin, among others. Verso Books published his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War in 2024.

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Examining the question of how the Universal Machine represents an epistemic force - this chapter explores how a Machine Culture’s socioplastic nature inevitably subjects its societies to a certain order.

Long before Columbus sets off to cross the Atlantic, the European Middle Ages is already the New World that it will seek and find in America.

Speaker: Hopkins Stanley

Sound-Design: Martin Burckhardt

Music: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

From: The Philosophy of the Machine, translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt. (to be published)

To listen to previous chapters:

Philosophy of the Machine 11

Philosophy of the Machine 10

Philosophy of the Machine 9

Philosophy of the Machine 8

Philosophy of the Machine 7

Philosophy of the Machine 6

Philosophy of the Machine 5

Philosophy of the Machine 4

Philosophy of the Machine 3

Philosophy of the Machine 2

Philosophy of the Machine 1

Here is the Link to the German Publication by Matthes & Seitz

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If one were to describe Scott Tinker's work, perhaps the most apt description would be to describe him as an anthropologist of human energy use. In any case, as a trained geologist who, after a few years in the Texas oil industry, went back to university and, in 2000, became Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas in Austin and State Geologist for the State of Texas, has spent a lifetime studying the relationship between energy use and society - a concern that, as he says, stems from a childhood memory of the former Soviet Union, where he inhaled the smell of poverty. And, to address the world's misery, he founded the Switch Energy Alliance, an organization whose mission is educating the public on the energy issue and how best to use it. To this end, he teamed up with the American filmmaker Harry Lynch, with whom he made two documentaries dealing with global energy consumption and energy poverty in the global South. In this context, Tinker has traveled to more than 65 countries worldwide and initiated a series of collaborations with various communities and tribes - an activity that’s also been reflected in his various TED Talks, Student lectures, newspaper articles and television appearances. 

Films

Switch On (2019) - a film on global energy poverty directed by Harry Lynch.

Switch (2012) - a film on global energy directed by Harry Lynch

Scott Tinker at the ARC conference in London, 2023

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